Venice Biennale 2024

The 60th edition of the Biennale Arte will be launched in Venice this spring. Ukraine will be represented at the international art exhibition by the project “Weaving Nets”.

The 60th International Art Exhibition will take place in Giardini and Arsenale from 20 April to 24 November 2024 (pre-opening on April 17, 18 and 19). This time the Biennale is curated by Adriano Pedrosa (the artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand – MASP; the 2023 recipient of the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, that was presented to him by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York).

The title of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia – Stranieri Ovunque (Foreigners Everywhere)– is drawn from a series of works started in 2004 by the Paris-born and Palermo-based Claire Fontaine collective. The phrase, in its turn, comes from the name of a Turin collective that fought racism and xenophobia in Italy in the early 2000s. The exhibition will spotlight artists from diverse backgrounds, giving space and visibility to previously marginalized groups, such as immigrants, expatriates, queer people, and indigenous individuals.

The 60th anniversary of the Venice Biennale will feature 90 National Participations in the historic Pavilions at the Giardini, at the Arsenale and in the city centre of Venice.

The public organization Ukrainian Photography will represent Ukraine this year with the project “Weaving the Nets”(curated by Max Gorbatskyi and Viktoria Bavykina).

The work refers to the metaphor of weaving a camouflage net as a joint action. The authors of the project are Ukrainian artists Katya Buchatska, Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva, Andriy Rachinskiy and Daniil Revkovskiy. Misha Buksha, Oleksandr Burlaka and Olena Kasperovych were engaged in the project.

“It’s a joint action that helps people. However, the participants are free in this horizontal interaction. It seemed to us to be a good metaphor for what Ukrainians are experiencing now, and in general since the Revolution of Dignity. Ukrainians have a very increased need for collective action, it has become one of the conditions of our survival. But at the same time, this interaction does not diminish any participant, allowing everyone to be emancipated. Our project does not oppose the collective to the individual, but rather strengthens them’, curators explained.

It should be noted that in 2021, Viktoria Bavykina co-curated the exhibition Open Opportunity at the M17 Contemporary Art Center, which featured works from private collections of Ukrainian collectors. And the artist Katya Buchatska was shortlisted for the M17 Sculpture Prize in 2020.

The M17 CAC team cordially congratulates the colleagues and sincerely wishes them every success!

Learn more about the 60th Venice Biennale here.

Information provided by Natalia Shpytkovska and Andriy Adamovskiy.